SCIENCE-THE DARK SIDE 259gossip. "Did you hear?" he whispered. " Olson's decided that they're go-
ing to reconstitute the committee and you are going to be removed." At
that time, Olson was still serving his one-year term as president of the
parent society, the American Institute of Nutrition, and had the power
to do such things.
I remember thinking that this news was neither surprising nor dis-
appointing. I knew I was the black sheep of the committee and had al-
ready stepped out of line at our inaugural meeting the previous year. My
continued involvement in this particular group was going to amount to
nothing more than trying to swim up Niagara Falls. The only reason I
was involved in the first place was because the director of the public af-
fairs office at the FASEB had secured me the spot.
I had thought the first year's committee meeting was dubious, but I
ran into an even more bizarre beginning at that second meeting a year
later, before Olson had the chance to remove me. When the proposal
to become a permanent organization within our society was put forth,
I was the only one to challenge the idea. I expressed concern that this
committee and its activities reeked of McCarthyism, which had no place
in a scientific research society. What I was saying made the chair of the
committee intensely angry and physically hostile, and I decided it was
best to just leave the room. I was clearly a threat to everything the com-
mittee members wanted to achieve.
After relating the whole ordeal to the newly-elected incoming presi-
dent of the society, Professor Doris Calloway of UC Berkeley, the com-
mittee was abolished and reformed, with me as the chair. Fortunately, I
persuaded our six-member committee to disband after less than a year,
and the whole sorry affair came to an end.
To stay and "fight the good fight," so to speak, was not an option. It
was early in my career and the awesome power wielded by the seniors in
my society was stark and intellectually brutal. For many of these char-
acters, searching for a truth that promoted public health over the status
quo was not an option. I am absolutely convinced that had I busied
myself with tackling these issues so early in my career, I would not be
writing this book. Research funding and publications would have been
difficult if not impossible to obtain.
Meanwhile, Bob Olson and some of his colleagues turned their at-
tention elsewhere, focusing on a relatively new organization founded
in 1978 called the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH).
Headquartered in New York City, the ACSH bills itself, still today, as a